Winter Wheat
So much about Ellen Webb’s coming of age in Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat (1944) is bound to the land of central Montana. As the only child of a Russian woman and a New England man it may seem strange that Ellen is born and raised on a dryland wheat farm in the middle of the Montana prairie. Yet, from the opening paragraph of Walker’s powerful novel it is clear that the wind-swept prairie is an intimate part of Ellen’s story. Like so many coming of age stories, Ellen only truly understands her own story, which is so wrapped up in those of her parents’, when she leaves the place she has always known as home; even in its absence the landscape of Montana plays an important role in Ellen’s psychology.
The novel opens in the year leading up to the second World War, but the Great War (WWI) haunts the Webb family. The wound that Ben, Ellen’s father, receives during his military service in Russia leads him to meet Anna (his Russian nurse), but also plagues him for the rest of his days. Years later, as Ellen prepares to leave her family’s Montana farm for college in Minnesota, she sorts through the nature of her parents’ relationship and questions how two such wildly different people could make a life together.
From the opening pages, the reader adores Ellen Webb, and Walker adroitly creates her protagonist as a believable and complex character who embraces life with a refreshing and inspiring vigor. Life on a dryland farm in the 1940s is not a gentle one, yet Ellen loves the land as if it were a family member. In addition to a moving coming of age narrative, Walker’s novel is a powerful description of mid-century Montana.
As Ellen experiences love and loss, and works through her relationship with her parents and herself, she finds her future utterly dependent on the land. A failed wheat crop means she is unable to attend a second year of college. The landscape of central Montana can be harsh to its inhabitants, as Ellen learns time and again in Winter Wheat. And yet, Ellen faces all her adversity in such a way that is inspirational even when it is tragic.
Few novels place a reader so solidly in a landscape like Walker’s Winter Wheat. This novel is both inspiring and heart-breaking, as Ellen becomes a woman amidst the backdrop of WWII. The first time I read this book, I lay on my parents’ couch in central Montana as the wind whipped across their front yard. Having spent time among the chinook winds of central Montana (though certainly not on a dryland wheat farm), I appreciate the landscape that Walker brings to life in Winter Wheat. I so enjoyed Walker’s style and Ellen’s person that I nearly read this novel in one sitting. And, I have to say, that re-reading it years later was equally enjoyable. It is a fast read, but certainly not a vapid one. Walker’s prose are crisp and detailed. Winter Wheat forces the reader (along with Ellen) to face the brutal realities of life and love and loss, and ultimately find the meaning of place and family and self.
Bibliography:
Walker, Mildred. Winter Wheat. Univ. of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1992.
A note on this publication: The copy of the book I read included an introduction by another great Montana writer, James Welch, which was a pleasant read after finishing Walker’s final paragraphs; I never read an introduction until completing the book itself.
A Few Great Passages:
“I hadn’t meant to fall in love so soon, but there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like planning to seed in April and then having it come off so warm in March that the earth is ready. The spring doesn’t wait” (49).
“Everything looked beautiful to me. I went out to see if the wild flowers on the prairie were still in bloom. The grass wasn’t very green, but there were bright blue and yellow and pink patches. I went up on the rimrock and felt the sun and looked way off to mountains. It was almost as though I told all the places I loved that I’d be back” (61).
“Slowly the thing I didn’t want to know bore in on me like the awful rising heat at harvesttime. People made messes of their lives and then they had to live with them. Life didn’t turn out right because you expected it to” (95).
“Time filled the room and lay across the empty prairie and pushed against the window. There was so much of it that it had pressure and weight. But it was empty” (158).
“Some days I forgot everything but the good feeling of the spring day and the soft cool air and the wideness of the field. When I stepped down off the tractor I liked even the stiff, sticky sqush [sic] of the gumbo furrows under my feet. I was glad it was an early spring; the winter had been long enough” (301).
